When I first heard about Congress adding a provision to a Defense Authorization bill that would allow for the U.S. MILITARY to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, without trial, just for being suspected of supporting anyone who was “engaged in hostilities against the United States,” I assumed it was just the work of some whacky right-winger who knew that the language didn’t have a chance of surviving the first round of mark-ups in conference committee. When the Senate and House overwhelmingly voted for the bill, with the President signing it in the dead of night when no one was looking, it struck me that something very strange was happening, and so far, no one has offered a serious explanation of why this bill came to be and is now law.

My friend Ray McGovern (former presidential CIA briefer among other things) wrote about this strange new law today in Common Dreams, saying:

Under the law, the president also may lock up anyone who commits a “belligerent act” against the U.S. or its coalition allies “without trial, until the end of the hostilities.” The law embraces the notion that the U.S. military can be used even domestically to arrest an American citizen or anyone else who falls under such suspicion – and it is “suspicion” because a trial can be avoided indefinitely.

Ray and I share much in common, including both of us having taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In his article, Ray points out something that I hadn’t thought of. Our oaths of office have no expiration date. Just because we both moved on from our military lives to civilian lives (or in Ray’s case from military to CIA to civilian), the oath still stands. So with that oath in mind, I have a question to ask. Without exposing any military secrets from my past, I’ll use the acronym WTFO? (What the F**&, Over?)

What could possibly have caused even some of the most liberal and conservative of members of Congress to vote for such sweeping power, handed to whoever happens to be president, for as long as “the long war” (as the Pentagon supposedly calls it), continues? Since we fought a revolutionary war against England for, among other things, allowing the military to trash the lives of civilians, it has been clear that the United States military can not and should not have the power to arrest American citizens, on American soil, and disappear them to places like Guantanamo Bay forever.

What terrible and frightful scenario is going on at this very moment that caused an unholy trinity of Republicans, Democrats and the President to literally trash the Constitution and 200 years of successful separation of military and civilian authority?

Somewhere, I suspect, there’s at least one American citizen already being held by U.S. military forces, whom they suspect of being involved in something so horrible that they have to keep him or her locked up while they try to unravel the mess that he or she is involved with. And… if the past is any teacher, that American probably worked for the U.S. military, some American contractor, or the CIA before becoming an enemy of the state. The president must have called key members of Congress into his office and told them the story, showed them horrifying pictures, and told them he needed the authority to do whatever it was he wanted to do or the world as we know it would end.

If this, or something like it, wasn’t the case, why are we not hearing howling from the rooftops over this absolutely unconstitutional and dangerous law? Sure, Jon Stewart is talking about it, but I’m beginning to agree with my husband who sees Jon Stewart as part of the “Dilbertization” of America. Dilbert allows people who work in corporations to laugh at the absurd and life-sucking practices of their overpaid and incompetent taskmasters. Laughter is much less a threat than revolution, so laugh away little drones! Now Jon Stewart gets Americans to laugh at the absurd and liberty-sucking practices of our overpaid, pampered, and incompetent government rulers. Haha. The president just signed away our right to a trial by a jury of our peers. Hahahahaha Jon Stewart is using a sock puppet that looks like Nancy Pelosi! Oh darn I spilled my soda I laughed so hard.

Ray McGovern is having none of that soda though. He’s wondering when Americans will get off the couch and rise up.

What about us? Can we not get up from our armchairs and do what we can to insist that those liberties be protected? How have we reached such a pass? Have we grown so inured to the repetition from our leaders, including both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, that keeping us “safe” is their first priority, that we have forgotten that the Founders risked everything for liberty, not for “safety”?

Madison already knew far too well what could pose the greatest danger to the Constitution. He recognized the inevitable effects on our liberties of “continual warfare” of the kind we have been waging for more than a decade now:

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.” [Or put in today's parlance, the 99 percent under the boot of the one percent.]

“The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

I’m with Madison and McGovern and I’m not laughing. This isn’t funny. This law is, if I may be not overly dramatic, treasonous. Congress and the President have violated their oaths of office by writing and signing this law. If the United States military is holding a U.S. citizen in military custody and has not allowed that person to have a civilian lawyer and access to a civilian court, members of the military involved in that imprisonment have violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and are committing treason.

Someone needs to speak up. Someone needs to expose whatever dirty secret the President and Congress are keeping. There’s a new Pentagon Papers out there. All we need is a Daniel Ellsberg.

What can we do? This goes beyond letter-writing. We need to go to our representative’s offices and demand a meeting, asking for an explanation of why this language was inserted into the appropriations bill and why it remained there.

Even if your representative voted no, you need to meet with them to ask what they’re going to do about it. We need to demand that this stain on the bill of rights be erased, quickly. While I don’t agree with the concept of “American Exceptionalism” I will say that we are unique in our history of standing for freedom, even at the risk of our safety. Today, however, we’re laughing our way into the gulag. This is a time when whoever your representative is, he or she needs to be told that we are not a Dilbert/Stewart country. We’re not laughing any more. This is not funny.

But Craig, isn’t Oboma the most brilliant president in history. Hell the smartest man on the planet. Weren’t things couldn’t to be better then the jackbooted fascism of the Bush theocracy,. I don’t understand.

This helps explain Alberto Gonzales’s coy smile when (during a hearing in 2006 or 2007, after a series of questions to which he non-answered with “I don’t recall”, and other lame evasions suggesting a cognitive disorder, there was an exchange between Gonzales & Arlen Specter about habeas corpus,
when Gonzales suddenly perked up and replied (paraphrasing), “But Senator Spector, there’s no “right to habeas corpus in the Constitution: it only states that habeas cannot be suspended except in cases
of open rebellion and…”. Whereupon Specter’s jaw dropped, and I almost had a panic attack, with the
unbidden thought, “Why that little smiling S.O.B. and his cronies have already been parsing the words of the Constitution to find a way to say that no one has habeas corpus unless it is first granted!” The hair went up on the back of my neck. Now that it has happened, I no longer chastise myself for being overly vigilant/suspicious. From Harmless Grandmother of 13 and DAR member.

There is something they are not telling us………….Yeah, like economically speaking they fully expect the Sh#! to hit the fan with more mass protests and worse in the streets. This is their clean up the mess law. You say you want a revolution? They say they want to disappear you. Things are going to get worse for a long while and they know it. They know it and won’t tell us they expect the worst and to answer the worst with even worse.

It seems to me that Paul, the last poster sums it up pretty well.
Democracy is on it’s last breath and liberty is worse than I ever or never ever thought it could be!
What happened here? Why didn’t we notice it’s start and do something. I guess the start was 9-11. The public start anyway.
Actually, it seem that may have been the 1st showing of it. I can’t say how scared I am to be in this New different America.
The one thing I always trusted was my country. My home of the brave, the protector, home of the free. Weren’t we supposed to be the good guys? We didn’t torture, we protected from those that do, and all that.

I don’t trust commentary on constitutional rights by someone who never read the Constitution. “Treason” is defined therein, and the way this writer throws “treasonous” around in an idiosyncratic way shows he’s not serious about the law and constitutional rights. He also doesn’t mention Obama’s lengthy signing statement, another sign of lack of the writer’s seriousness.

Having read the Constitution many many times, even often carrying a small pocket-sized version (that a member of Congress with whom I often disagreed but always respected gave me many years ago), I do have to admit that the precise definition of treason as stated in Article 3 Section 3 is more about levying war against the United States.

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

I should have called them traitors, which according to a dictionary is “One who betrays one’s country, a cause, or a trust, especially one who commits treason.”

And yes, I was aware of President Obama’s signing statement. Those statements are not worth the paper on which they are written (typed, computer imprinted, or whatever the most accurate words would be). The law is the law. Presidents are not bound by signing statements. Even “Executive Orders” are not worth the paper they are written on, because like signing statements, future presidents don’t have to follow them. Even the president who wrote an executive order can exempt people from following it, as was and is the case in assassinations carried out by this president and his predecessors since Gerald Ford’s executive order against such acts (and Jimmy Carter’s follow up to Ford’s orders).

My question for Rodger Lodger is this. Do you support the idea of the US military being allowed to arrest American citizens, while on American soil (not on a US military base) and holding them indefinitely, without allowing them access to a civilian court? Take it one step further. That’s the situation we as Americans should be discussing.

I believe that anyone who supports this law is swapping security for freedom and trashing the most fundamental rights we have to life and liberty. My brothers and sisters in arms, all of whom swore to uphold and defend our constitution (and most of whom have actually read it), have risked their lives and many have died for those fundamental rights so that most people can sit in the comfort and privacy of their homes and read the Constitution (or the funny papers).